1. Field of Use
This disclosure is directed to an image forming apparatus and an intermediate transfer member.
2. Background
In the printing industry many of the current flexible photoreceptor belts (P/R) or intermediate transfer belts are obtained by shearing a piece of web material coated with several layers of an organic material with desired electrical and mechanical properties and welding the two ends together in a variety of ways such as electro-welding. The seam present in the intermediate transfer belts creates certain issues. One issue is the need to avoid the seam coming into a printed area. Seam detection and managing the duty cycles for various paper lengths is a complicated software and technology challenge. Due to their expense, seamless belts have been used predominantly for large machines.
Seamless P/R and intermediate transfer belts, especially for smaller low volume printers, would be useful. For color machine architecture, a seamless intermediate transfer belt would reduce the size of a full color machine.